London theatre reviews

As a schoolchild in the late ‘90s I swear to god I saw a production of The Tempest  – I think at Malvern Theatre – that mostly consisted of Prospero and his villainous brother Antonio playing chess together, while the rest of the play kind of happened around them. It was so weird that I now occasionally doubt it actually happened. But also I’m pretty sure it did as I remember it so clearly. And Tim Crouch’s new production of The Tempest brought it to mind: I think it might baffle a lot of people, but I doubt any of them will forget it in a hurry.

The far right on the streets, an agenda-filled press and a nation caught in a cost-of-living crisis being encouraged to blame immigrants for its woes. It’s not hard to see why this new musical – set in the lead-up to and aftermath of the real-life 1936 stand against the march of Oswald Mosley’s black-shirt fascists by the residents of Cable Street in London’s East End – resonates so powerfully now…

Theatre has always been political. And there are few companies who believe that more than Good Chance Theatre. Responsible for refugee-centric works The Jungle, Kyoto, and the globe-trotting puppet project The Walk, they’ve now returned to the stage as producers of A Grain of Sand, a one-woman show about the plights of the children of Gaza…

Luke Norris’s first play in an age quite doesn’t have an M Night Shyamalan-level twist, but it does take a few pretty shocking turns from quite early on, and for that reason I’m going to talk about the plot in maddeningly general terms, so sorry for that…

After two musical adaptations of The Great Gatsby in the last three years, maybe it was inevitable that musical theatre, hungry for a further Fitzgerald fix, would turn to the life of its author F Scott and his wife Zelda…

Dante or Die’s resurrected 2013 show feels like a sweet throwback to the glory days of the site-specific theatre era: that is to say, plays that are written in response to the specific, non-theatre building they’re staged in. 

I have in the past been guilty of suggesting all Cirque du Soleil shows are the same, but the return of the insect-themed extravaganza OVO does in fact demonstrate the Quebecois circus giants are capable of change…

Putting a film western on stage is an odd idea that doesn’t seem any less odd having seen High Noon, an adaptation of the classic allegorical 1952 movie starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly. 

In An Interrogation, his debut as a writer-director, Jamie Armitage tackled the police procedural, which is not something you see in the theatre very often. Now he’s back with an even more ambitious oddity in the form of A Ghost in Your Ear, an MR James-ish horror story with a mischievous metatheatrical gleam in its eye.